Major forest fires are relatively uncommon in the northeastern United States, but due to the high population density of the region, if they became more common, the potential consequences for the region would be profound. This project has several goals: first, to assess the history of large fires (before measured records) using sedimentary records from lakes; second, to compare the different measures (indices) of fire vulnerability used by various management agencies; third, to determine how well models simulate past fire vulnerability based on these indices; fourth, to assess fire vulnerability in the future, using GCM projections.